by Adam Roberts
‘It’s common enough, in the uplands,’ Diana pointed out.
‘Indeed it is, soft-body girl!’ said Joad. ‘And why not? If you never plan on coming down the well, then you won’t miss them. Legs are of little use in zero gravity, after all. Some people go so far as to have them deliberately amputated – or to sell them. People will sell anything if they’re poor enough.’
‘The fact that he has no legs,’ said Eva, ‘rather suggests he’s an uplander-only kind of fellow.’
‘That’s a reasonable assumption to make, I suppose,’ said Joad, indulgently. ‘Though some of his victims have been murdered at the bottom of gravity wells. Glass isn’t his real name you know. People call him Jack because, well, it’s a serial killer-y name. As for his surname, well. We’re not entirely sure what his real surname is. It may be Prytherch. I don’t know what sort of a name that’s supposed to be. Do you know how he acquired the name Glass?’
‘How?’
‘He acquired that surname for reasons to do with his – work. It’s how he kills, our Jack-the-Ripper of the spaceways. It was the same with the victims in Lamy306; he killed them all and cut their bodies up with sharpened slivers of glass.’ Ms Joad was looking directly at her.
Her black eyes. Oh! Totally shiversome, Dia thought. Then she thought: maybe Eva is more squeamish than I, but – oh!
‘They say he has hey-ho murdered more than a thousand people,’ said Diana, with a touch of awe in her voice.
‘Or a million,’ said Joad. ‘Depending upon which story you believe. What is certain is that his murder rate has reduced recently. Until his spree on Lamy306, in fact, he hadn’t killed in quite a long time! Of course, it is getting harder for him. We are making it harder for him. After Lamy306 we disseminated his DNA details to every policeperson, civvie and personnel checker in the System. With that, no legs and a bad reputation, he’s starting to sore-thumb stick out. Each new murder is a risk for him. He can no longer be, eh, gratuitous. My belief is that when he murders, now, it is only for a very good reason.’
‘And has he?’ Diana asked. She could not keep the eagerness from her voice. ‘Has he murdered again?’
‘My love, why else do you think I am here?’
The two girls looked at her. ‘You don’t mean to suggest—?’ began Eva.
‘It’s not possible,’ Diana said, loudly, at the same time.
There was a moment’s pause.
‘And one of the remarkable things about Mr Glass,’ said Joad, with a serious face, ‘is the knack he has for making the impossible happen. Indeed, indeed, indeed. Escaping Lamy306! Well, I am still chasing him, and I have reason to believe that he has his sights set upon your precious selves, my dears.’
‘No,’ said Dia.
This was the wrong thing to say – not just the word but the tone. Joad turned her eyes upon Diana. They were black in the way that tsunami water is black as it washes through the ruined town, black because it has churned up the living and the dead. They were the colour of hope liquidised into despair. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said, with a formal chill.
‘Please, eh, forgive me for contradicting you,’ said Diana, sweat tickling her upper lip. ‘But, if we all remain cool and chilly for a moment, you’re saying our servant was murdered by Jack Glass. You’re saying that the famous Jack Glass came here and murdered our servant?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying,’ said Ms Joad, sombrely.
‘And then – what? Then he left?’
‘Since he’s no longer here,’ said Joad, ‘Yes. Your security people have searched the whole estate of course. The police have searched the surrounding territory.’
‘But – why?’ asked Diana. ‘Why would he come here, go to the bother of breaching our security only to kill a servant? Why not us?’
‘I’m not saying,’ noted Joad, her smile returning, ‘that he has finished.’
There was a moment of silence.
‘But why us?’
‘Oh, my dear thing! Your sister, with her attention wholly focused on those anomalous supernovae, I might expect her not to know! But you? Surely you’ve deciphered what the hidden thing is – the thing that nobody is talking about, and that the Polloi don’t even know exists, but the thing everybody who knows is secretly talking about?’
‘What?’ asked Diana, flushing with embarrassment. ‘What is it?’
Joad looked at the guards, and replied. ‘FTL of course! A thing worth killing for. Something the possession of which will give the owner unprecedented power and wealth. A functioning faster-than-light technology.’
‘But,’ said Diana, again. ‘What’s that got to do with us?’ Even as she asked this, she knew the answer. Because the Argents’ reputation was based on their knowledge-wealth, their skill at finding things out. If anybody knew about a mysterious new technology it would be them.
‘Never mind why,’ said Eva, with a single horizontal fold in her clear, beautiful brow. ‘I want to know how he is supposed to have done this.’
‘Of course my wonder child,’ said Joad. ‘You would be more interested in practical hows than fiddly human whys.’
‘I’m serious,’ said Eva. ‘There is unbroken surveillance of the servants’ house – of the whole estate. For the entirety of the relevant period nobody entered or exited the house. How did your infamous Jack Glass get inside the storeroom to bash the servant’s head with that big hammer?’
‘The how is an interesting question, isn’t it?’ said Joad. ‘The who has been answered, so the how remains.’
‘How did he get on the island, never mind anything else. How did he get down to Earth, through all the security checks? How did he even know we are here?’
‘All good questions,’ said Joad.
‘And how did he get inside a locked house without being noticed by any of the surveillance systems?’
‘You might ask: how did he get out of Lamy306?’ Joad replied. ‘I don’t know. But he did.’
‘What evidence do you have that he killed our servant?’
‘You’ll have to believe me. I can’t tell you exactly how I know. You’ll understand that there are levels of secrecy within secrecy. I shouldn’t even, strictly speaking, have dropped those three little letters into the conversation.’
‘FTL?’ said Diana, again. ‘Why? Why come down here, sneak inside the servants’ house, bash out his brains – for FTL? I don’t, I don’t understand, I don’t understand.’
Ms Joad rose, smoothly enough, but with a slight wibble of her leg muscles inside their crawlipers. ‘It is a puzzle, I agree. I’ll admit the how baffles me as much as it does anybody else. But you can surely work that out! After all, your MOHmies have the highest regard for your problem-solving abilities, my dears. The highest regard.’
‘Are you saying,’ Eva pressed, ‘that Jack Glass teleported into our servants’ house?’
‘There’s no such thing as teleportation, my dear,’ said Joad. ‘Might I have my weapon back please?’
Berthezene brought out the smartcloth pouch.
‘I’ll have the handservants get a house ready for you, Ms Joad,’ said Eva, remembering her hospitable instincts rather belatedly. ‘Do you have a preference – inland, or by the coast?’
‘Oh I’m not staying, my darlings,’ said Ms Joad, looking at neither of them.
‘Oh!’ said Eva, as if slapped. ‘You’re going straight back up?’
‘The Ulanovs are not people to keep waiting,’ she said. Then, she turned her black gaze upon each of the MOHsisters, one after the other. ‘You have bright futures, as information artistes, my dears, I have no doubt of that. And so you will learn: there are things you can learn by being in the same physical space as somebody that you cannot learn from an ideality, no matter how fine-grained it may be.’
‘And what have you learned from us, Ms Joad?’ Dia asked, emboldened.
‘I have learned,’ she said, her glance settling momentarily upon Dia. ‘Which of the two celebrated MOHsisters
is the one to watch.’
Diana felt giddy, as if removed from the usual rubrics of caution. ‘But at any rate, Ms Joad, we must thank you for letting us know that our servant was actually killed by Jack Glass, no less. Though I do still wonder how he magically got inside the servants’ house.’
‘I’ve no idea!’ said Ms Joad. ‘Goodbye my loves.’
As soon as she had gone, and whilst Deño supervised a new search of the area (there was nothing to find; his people were nothing if not thorough), Eva and Dia called up their MOHmies again – an awkward, blurry, nauseous image, since the security routers sent it through nearly a thousand-or-so random pathways before making the connection. But there they were: both parents, arms linked, floating in space, and the space all around them coloured bright with the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Diana told them that Ms Joad had visited, although (of course) they already knew that. Nor did they seem particularly worried by this. ‘You two can solve this horrid mystery,’ they said, in one voice. ‘Work together, daughters!’ ‘Ms Joad said the murderer was Jack Glass,’ said Diana. ‘A lot of nonsense is spoken about that fellow,’ said MOHmie Yin. ‘If you listen to the rumours he’s ninety-percent Grendel and only ten percent man! But I refuse to believe he’s a superman. He’s only a man. He’s not even the shadow of his own reputation.’ ‘I don’t see how he can have done it,’ said Eva. ‘I don’t understand, practically speaking, how it can have been done.’ ‘You’re a smart girl,’ said MOHmie Yang. ‘You will figure it out.’
Just before the conversation ended, Diana said: ‘Ms Joad said it had to do with FTL.’ Hard to gauge it on so shimmery a skyline, but at those three letters it was almost as if both MOHmies shuddered. Did they? Or was it a flaw in the image rendering?
‘Hard to see what a servant could know about such a thing,’ said MOHmie Yang. ‘Or what it might have to do with murder.’ But there was a strange tone to her voice. Was she angry? Diana got that seventh-sense intimation that she had touched on an unmentionable matter; although a strangely involuted one whereby the fact that it was unmentionable was itself unmentionable. ‘FTL is a hippogriff,’ said MOHmie Yin, grinning unconvincingly. MOHmie Yin added: ‘it’s a nonsense, it’s a no-thing. It’s impossible, you know. The laws of physics forbid it.’
‘And talking of laws,’ said MOHmie Yang. ‘We have accredited you both as crime investigators under Ulanov law. The local policepersons must defer to you, now.’
‘Oh they’re already doing that,’ said Diana, dismissively.
‘Sort this mystery out!’ the MOHmies sang, in unison. ‘Make us proud, daughters!’ And that was the end of the conversation.
The sisters sat together for a while. Diana worked more-or-less idly through what her bId had on the legendary Jack Glass. Three quarters myth and improbable fantasy; the rest the usual life of a political dissident with murderous and terroristical-violence proclivities. There was nothing in any of the easily accessible datafields about him being captured, locked away in an asteroid, and then – impossibly, magically – escaping his prison. The Ulanovs were keeping that fact tightly controlled, it seemed, for whatever reason. Assuming Ms Joad hadn’t simply made it up, for her own reasons. She stared at the image of his face. It looked as bland as any other face. Murderers often did.
‘I still don’t see why,’ said Eva, unable to get Ms Joad’s black gaze out of her mind, ‘she had to come in person. All the way from the Ulanovs! To us?’
‘Something is wrong,’ said Diana. ‘She didn’t come down here just to meet us in person. We’re hardly important enough. And there’s literally no reason why she should be interested in the death of a servant.’
‘So she came just to intimidate us, then. A personal visit is more intimidating than an appearance in the IP, after all.’ And then: ‘which is to say, she came to intimidate our MOHmies. Not us: we hardly matter, in the larger scheme of things, after all. This was her way of saying to our MOHmies – we’re watching your daughters, we can get to them, we can reach them.’
And it was at that moment that Diana had one of her intuitive leaps of comprehension, the sort of instinctive human-nature-based insight of which Eva was not capable (for all her five years of extra life and her six PhDs). ‘They’re scared.’
‘What?’
It was almost a criminal act to say this; and Dia could not help glancing nervously around. Almost certainly this space was shielded and protected against direct Ulanov surveillance. But almost certainly was not as reassuring a form of words as you might want, where the ultimate powers in the system were concerned. ‘The Ulanovs are scared – of us, of the Argents, of our MOHclan.’
‘Why?’
‘Do I have to spell it out for you, Eva? Those three little words, I suppose. Do you think I even know? I’m fifteen years old, and politics and conspiracy and power-jockeying and all that are beyond me. But they won’t be forever. And you can bet your bippy the Ulanovs have an enhanced sensitivity to the pre-tremors of rebellion. They’re scared that the Argents are about to – I don’t know what. But something.’
Eva was wide-eyed. ‘Do you think we are? Our MOHmies, I mean?’
‘I don’t know, do I? But that would explain her strange insistence that it was Jack Glass who killed our poor little handservant Leron. Why him?’
‘Explain it how?’
Diana pushed some tagged data into one of her sister’s IP atria. ‘See for yourself. There’s nothing in this data to upset a squeamish MOHsister, I should add – though he has done some horrible things to his fellow human beings. But I’ve tagged up a dozen or so key semes, and the main one is: his close association with the Revolutionary movements.’
‘The Terrorists,’ Eva said, automatically, a more-or-less superstitious reflex.
‘Sure. Terrorists. Antinomians. Followers of Mithras. All that. Glass is a kind of figurehead, or inspiration, for these groups. He has devoted his life, apparently, to overthrowing the Ulanovs.’
Eva whistled a C# through perfectly pursed lips. ‘Is that what Joad was saying? Was that her coded way of warning us that the Ulanovs suspect us of having Antinomian sympathies? “Jack Glass is your murderer” . . . means that?’
‘Or if not us, then maybe amongst our servants?’
‘Oh how could that even be? These are carefully selected handservants! They go through – goddess, I don’t even know how many layers of preselection and vetting. How could they slip through that degree of checking?’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Diana agreed. ‘There are too many levels on which it doesn’t make sense. Unless.’
‘Unless?’
‘Unless our MOHmies have some new leverage. Some new means of applying pressure. Those three letters Joad made such a fuss about accidentally-on-purpose letting slip.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Eva.
That evening the girls ate together in the snug. Deño and Iago ate at a separate table. An open window let in odours of salt-water and lavender. The seesaw of the cicadas swelled and shrank, as if the air itself were pulsing. Or yawning. The view was of the stalagmite silhouettes of the cypresses, and above them was the black-blue nightsky, speckled all over with lights. More of these were in motion than were stationary.
‘When I mentioned FTL to our MOHmies,’ Diana said, because she had been ruminating on this for a while, ‘it was as if I had uttered a profanity.’
Eva looked at her. ‘You think?’
‘Why should it be a secret?’ Diana asked. ‘If somebody has developed the technologies of faster-than-light travel – well, then, that’s a cause of collective human celebration! It would mean the freedom of the stars! Why would it need to be kept secret, why would people kill for it, why would MOHmie Yang flinch when I said it?’
‘Maybe it was only a wobble in the image,’ said Eva.
‘It would be like the Wright brothers discovering heavier-than-air flight, then sealing the data in a chip and telling nobody. Surely it would make sense just t
o . . . disseminate the knowledge? To lodge a copy in a public IP, something?’
‘There’s no FTL technology,’ said Eva. ‘It doesn’t exist. Any such thing would violate the laws of physics. It’s a nonsense.’
‘Wouldn’t that make it more ironic, though? People killing one another over what they think is a new FTL technology, when such technology doesn’t even exist! Killing people just over a rumour.’
‘Anyone with a kindergarten education knows that faster-than-light travel is a nonsense,’ said Eva again. ‘Anybody not actually a member of the Sumpolloi knows it.’
‘It’s exactly the Sumpolloi who are likely to believe it, though,’ said Diana, thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps that’s the point. If there really were an FTL technology then people could use it to flee the System . . . couldn’t they? They could use it to escape the Lex Ulanova altogether.’
‘And if there were a technology to make us all-powerful and immortal then we’d all be gods,’ said Eva. ‘But there isn’t.’
‘You’re missing my point. The point is that the idea of it could become a symbol, a flag. A banner. A rallying point for revolution.’
Eva shuddered. ‘I do wish you’d stop using that word.’
After supper they prayed together, and kissed, and then they went to their separate bedrooms.
6
The Gate of Horn and the Gate of Ivory
Diana’s head was filled with motion and electricity. All our heads are, of course. But hers was of a degree of sophistication unusual amongst human beings. She was thinking: and if there were a technology that violated the laws of physics and permitted FTL travel. Would it, having violated one law of physics, allow the user to violate other ones? Teleportation, for instance? As Deño made a final check of her room, she asked him: ‘Dominico, am I safe here?’
‘Yes, Miss,’ he replied. ‘As safe as we can make you.’
‘What if a murderer could teleport directly into my room?’
Deño’s face registered puzzlement. ‘But Miss,’ he said. ‘There’s no way anybody could do that.’
